13 Linux Performance Monitoring Tools – Part 2

If you’re working as a Linux/Unix system administrator, sure you know that you must have useful monitoring tools to monitor your computers & systems, monitoring tools are very important in the job of a system administrator or a server webmaster, it’s the best way to keep an eye on what’s going on inside your system.

Today we’re going to talk about another 13 Linux monitoring tool that you may use to do the job.

21. Glances – Real Time System Monitoring

Glances is a monitoring tool built to present as much information as possible in any terminal size, it automatically takes the terminal window size it runs on, in other words, it’s a responsive monitoring tool.

23. Apache Status Monitoring

Apache Module mod_status is an Apache server module that allows you to monitor the workers status of the Apache server. It generates a report in an easy to read HTML format. It shows you the status of all the workers, how much CPU each one using, and what requests are currently handled and number of working and not working workers.

24. Monit – Linux Process and Services Monitoring

Monit is a nice program that monitors your Linux & Unix server, it can monitor everything you have on your server, from the main server (Apache, Nginx..) to files permissions, files hashes and web services. Plus a lot of things.

Monit: Linux Process Monitoring

Features of Monit

Free & open-source, released under AGPL and written in C.

It can be started from the command line interface or via its special web interface.

Very effective in monitoring all the software on your system and services.

25. Sysstat – All-in-One System Performance Monitoring

Another monitoring tool for your Linux system. Sysstat is not a real command in fact, it’s just the name of the project, Sysstat in fact is a package that includes many performance monitoring tools like iostat, sadf, pidstat beside many other tools which shows you many statistics about your Linux OS.

26. Icinga – Next Generation Server Monitoring

Unlike the other tools, Icinga is a network monitoring program, it shows you many options and information about your network connections, devices and processes, it’s a very good choice for those who are looking for a good tool to monitor their networking stuffs.

27. Observium – Network Management and Monitoring

Observium is also a network monitoring tool, it was designed to help you manage your network of servers easily, there are 2 versions from it; Community Edition which is free & open-source and Commercial version which costs £150/year.

29. PHP Server Monitoring

Unlike the other tools on this list, PHP Server Monitoring is a web script written in PHP that helps you to manage you websites and hosts easily, it supports MySQL database and is released under GPL 3 or later.

PHP Server Monitor

Features

A nice web interface.

Ability to send notifications to you via Email & SMS.

Ability to view the most important information about CPU and RAM.

A very modern logging system to log connection errors and emails that are sent.

Support for cronjob services to help you monitor your servers and websites automatically.

30. Linux Dash – Linux Server Performance Monitoring

From its name, “Linux Dash” is a web dashboard that shows you the most important information about your Linux systems such as RAM, CPU, file-system, running processes, users, bandwidth usage in real time, it has a nice GUI and it’s free & open-source.

31. Cacti – Network and System Monitoring

Cacti is nothing more than a free & open-source web interface for RRDtool, it is used often to monitor the bandwidth using SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), it can be used also to monitor CPU usage.

32. Munin – Network Monitoring

Munin is also a web interface GUI for RRDtool, it was written in Perl and licensed under GPL, Munin is a good tool to monitor systems, networks, applications and services. It works on all Unix-like operating systems and has a nice plugin system; there are 500 different plugin available to monitor anything you want on your machine. A notifications system is available to send messages to the administrator when there’s an error or when the error is resolved.

33. Wireshark – Network Protocol Analyzer

Also, unlike all the other tools on our list, Wireshark is an analyzer desktop program which is used to analyze network packets and to monitor network connections. It’s written in C with the GTK+ library and released under the GPL license.

Wireshark Network Analyzer

Features

Cross-platform: it works on Linux, BSD , Mac OS X and Windows.

Command line support: there’s a command line based version from Wireshark to analyze data.

These were the most important tools to monitor your Linux/Unix machines, of course there are many other tools, but these are the most famous. Share your thoughts with us in the comments: What tools & programs do you use to monitor your systems? Have you used any of the tools on this list? What do you think about them?

I am Ravi Saive, creator of TecMint. A Computer Geek and Linux Guru who loves to share tricks and tips on Internet. Most Of My Servers runs on Open Source Platform called Linux. Follow Me: Twitter, Facebook and Google+

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12 Responses

A good one.
One more suggestion you might want to consider for monitoring tools is AgentlessMonitor from AppPerfect which covers most of the aspects of monitoring like JAVA / J2EE application monitoring, server monitoring, database monitoring, transaction monitoring, network monitoring, log monitoring and system monitoring and last, but not the least is available for free.

Not only do we provide the product, they also provide you the option to have it custom made for you keeping in mind your needs and cost constraints.

It is very easy to use and generates automated alerts in case of exceeding limits or rules violation and also needs no bulky agent to be installed.

I think SeaLion (https://sealion.com/) is worth a mention here. It’s not as popular as Nagios or Zabbix but is a very powerful tool. I currently use this tool to keep an eye on my servers and it’s very impressive.
It’s very simple to install and use, has a neat and clean UI. It also lets you add your own commands and has a feature to get all the updates in a single mail as a daily digest.

Also I am looking forward for an article related with some specific Opensource tools/softwares to analyse Apache Error and Access logs

More better will be to know a Open Source tool to analyse MySQL logs in realtime i.e. If someone have Webfrontend based on a Customer Java program but uses MySQL for most of the operations then a tool which can show which MySQL query was executed during an operation performed by the end user

A great list, but i think that I can add one more tool to the list. This tool is Anturis and it is a cloud-based tool with all in one character and which can monitor the whole company IT infrastructure and all kinds of servers at the same time. This is an agent tool which checks all the essential metrics like CPU, Memory, Disk, Swap and Network Interface usage, OS Processes etc.